I have never hung up on an interview more confused and shocked than the interview I had with Toku. I closed my laptop and immediately said "Well that was weird." I don't know where to begin, really. This was the first interview round and they had me interview with a tech lead who had only been there for 3 months, They didn't really ask many formal questions. The first thing said to me was 'Tell me what you would do in this role' - I wanted to respond by telling them that this is something that they should know. Like, I told them what value I think UX brings, but this tech lead didn't know much about UX and didn't seem to value it at all. They currently just have engineers design things and the roadmap seems to be entirely defined by sales. As I was told, sales is told a feature by some customer and then engineers just build it - there is no time for research because why would there be? I tried to talk about design system things and how a solid design system could help engineers and designers alike and it seemed as though they just wanted to hire a designer to essentially contract out a design system. I was asked repeatedly "How long would it take you to build a design system" which is an impossible question to answer, especially when I have yet to play with the product or ask any questions about the company myself. They just wanted to know how long it would take me to do designs, what I would do as a designer there, etc. I walked away confident that they do not know what they are hiring for and have little direction as a company. They are going to amass an incredible amount of tech debt because of the process they are following. And then they sent a rejection email saying they always want to make sure they set new hires up for success - but I am 100% confident that no matter the designer they hire, this company will not set them up for success. The new hire will be railroaded by engineering and mired in confusion due to a lack of vision, roadmap, or planning. I almost ended the interview by walking out myself 4 times throughout the interview because it was so abundantly obvious that this was not a place where UX would be respected.